currently i am working on oracle collab suite 10g on RHEL4, but i always wanted to be an oracle dba. i'm thinking of getting myself certified -OCA as my first step & look for jr dba positions, but i'll still suffer from the chicken and egg syndrom.. can somebody give some advice pls. i need to figure out a way. any help/advice is much appreciated

This is a personal comment:
I believe some people make mistakes and waste a lot of time and money trying to move without knowing they are sitting on the right stuff.

And this is a personal opinion:
If I were in your position, I would stick or go back to 2 above (not the job, but the skill/expertise) and then expand my knowlege as Oracle Financials Functional Consultant within e-Business Suite since you already have the audit/financial background. Then look for jobs in that area rather than DBA. If not Functional, then Applications DBA will be better.

I guess there are a lot of people in this forum who want to move from DBA to Functional Consultant or Application DBA, but have not got the knowledge.

There is a lot more work for application developers and Vendor Application experts like SAP or Oracle Applications including Financials than there are DBA jobs these days.

The experience from your second position may look good to a lot of potential employers though depending on the level of detail and amount of non-IT tasks involved it may or may not have been a good learning experience.

I would stick with job 3 for a while. I suspect that many people in a hiring position would feel better about making a job offer to someone with a record of staying put for a couple of years rather than only a couple of months.

>>>
The experience from your second position may look good to a lot of potential employers though depending on the level of detail and amount of non-IT tasks involved it may or may not have been a good learning experience
<<<

this is what I do in my previous company. there are huge amount of non-IT tasks involved i must say.. :
IT:
apps dba (support), contracts

IT dept is rather small, only doing support. all developments are outsourced. then the mgmt sees that IT dept got nothing to do when everything is working fine. maybe these sr managers see IT is only about internet, email and repairing PC..

i really love the job, but concurrently my time was wasted on other things. i cannot claim i have extensive knowledge being apps dba. in the mean time finding jobs as apps dba / dba is hard with minimal knowledge and exp, while devoting most of my time doing those non-IT things will get me nowhere.

i would stay if i could focus being apps dba there. there are tonnes of things to be learned. but sometimes life just pushes your around.. or maybe it's just the taste of life

i'm searching & applying for jr apps dba post, even though i'm new here. not a good attitude though. currently concentrating on oracle collaboration suite, during me free time i will educate myself and prepare for certification. and hopefully will let me get what i want. this is what i'm planning rite know.

i always wanted to be successful in my career. i also have ambition like all u guys do. any opinion & suggestions are most welcome. guidance and ideas etc are very much appreciated. thanks

The great majority of people hired into entry DBA positions have development experience, usually with several of the tools in use at the hiring site. Very few people can train to do DBA work and then just find a position without previous developer experience since at many sites most of the job is working with the development/support staff.

The great majority of people hired into entry DBA positions have development experience

Yes and the rest usually come in through being a sysadmin. It is interesting that now there is a third route - application server, not least because this tool uses a database for some of its functions. AS underpins Collab Suite, so I would have thought the current position is a possible springboard into a fully-fledged DBA role.

But how much DBA work (creating objects, making db backup, practicing restore and recovery, SQL tuning) would an web server administrator ever do? We dumped the web server on the System Administrators. All they have to do is stop and restart application support tasks and update a file (usually jar file) every now and then that the developers provide to them.

Yep, collab suite used AS architecture, but very minimal DBA works involved..

I do have a litle faith that this AS/OCS can be a stepping stone to be not a full-fledged, but for junior position. I've seen somewhere in this forum a support staff >> AS developer>> Jr DBA. don't know how he did it though..

Certification may not be so valuable but it can force me to selfstudy and practise. But where can i get the dba exp? voluntary works might help. Is there any other way?

But how much DBA work (creating objects, making db backup, practicing restore and
recovery, SQL tuning) would an web server administrator ever do? We dumped
the web server on the System Administrators

Well obviously YMMV applies here. Some shops have sysadmins, DBAs, network engineers and app server guys in separate units, maybe in separate offices. At the other extreme in smaller places they all share the same pair of pants (because they are the same person, no aspersions on personal hygiene habits of admin people intended). But I have come across several places where these tech-y infrastructure roles are lumped into one unit, with at least the possibility of cross-fertilisation of experience and even job-swapping.

Managing a career transition is a tricky thing to pull off. It's relatively easy to persuade somebody to give us another job doing what we do already. It's much harder to get a job doing something different. How do we cross that gap? By impressing the manager of our current role with our talents in that role while also demonstrating an aptitude for our target role to whoever has the power to put us into that job. And if you find out how to that let me know :P